


In This Abyss

by LovelySilverwood (Eanna23je)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Dark Arya Stark, Dark Jon Snow, Dark Romance, F/M, Game of Thrones References, Game of Thrones Spoilers, Gothic Romance, Possessive Jon Snow, The North (ASOIAF), The Wuthering Heights AU nobody asked for, Wuthering Heights References, unhealthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:13:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 5,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22111639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eanna23je/pseuds/LovelySilverwood
Summary: Her first clear memory was of the stormy night Father brought his bastard home to Winterfell. The others had been under stern orders to bed hours before, but they did not know what Arya knew... Thus begins a tale of possession, obsession and the lengths Jon will go to keep Arya forever at his side. GOT/Wuthering Heights inspired gift for Jonrya Week 2020's Day 2 Prompt: Darkness.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Arya Stark
Comments: 14
Kudos: 110
Collections: Jonrya Week: January 2020





	1. startling likeness

**Author's Note:**

> “Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”  
> ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her…”

Her first clear memory was of the stormy night Father brought his bastard home to Winterfell. The others had been under stern orders to bed hours before, but they did not know what Arya knew. 

They called her Arya Underfoot because she was always getting in the way. In truth, Arya was very good at being small and unseen when she wished. And since she was a nasty, wild thing, unlike her beautiful and prim sister Sansa, the others left Arya to her own devices.

Lightning illuminated the doorway to the entry hall as Father opened and hauled his bastard over the threshold. “—will obey my order without question, do you understand me, boy?” he was saying. 

The sullen bastard with the soaking wet black hair looked to be of age with Robb, only taller, and sickly thin. His clothes were threadbare and horribly common, and even from her hiding place on the stair, Arya could tell he’d not bathed in weeks. 

The boy didn’t answer Father’s demands.

_Clever boy,_ she thought. Since Mother’s passing in childbirth the year prior, and the demands of the mysterious Baratheon King, the loving father her siblings remembered had disappeared beneath grief and bitterness.

Arya gripped the wooden guard rails as Father slapped the boy hard enough to make him fall.

“I said, do you _understand_?”

Thunder rumbled beyond their silent halls, and Arya covered her gasp. 

The boy’s arms shook as he nodded and slowly stood. “I understand, Sir.”

Father lifted his chin. “See that you always do, and you shall have a place at my table, Jon Snow.” He strode three steps forward, then paused when the boy did not follow.

Arya held her breath as the boy remained frozen in place, his head facing the staircase. His hair covered his eyes, but she caught a gleam of silver in the next flash of lightning. Arya leaned back into the shadows just as Father returned to the boy’s side and dragged him to the kitchens.


	2. a wild, wicked slip of a girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “She was a wild, wicked slip of a girl. She burned too bright for this world.”

His life had always been a very ugly thing. The seaside village where his mother whored for their living had been devoid of color. The waves would crash against the lighthouse Jon sometimes drew on rocks or whatever scraps he could get his hands on. Mother had cursed his penchant for lighting things on fire, just to see which could create the best charcoal. Now she was finally dead, and he’d been, for a moment, free. 

He’d wanted to hop on the nearest frigate, sell himself as a cabin boy and leave the muddy, dreary village far behind. Before he could do much of anything besides arranging for her pauper’s funeral, Jon had been greeted by the sole other graveside attendee. Eddard Stark, a man with stern gray eyes just like his mothers—like Jon’s. A man who wore clothes richer than anything Jon had touched in his life. 

He’d been afraid to grasp the man’s hand as he was told, “I am claiming you as my bastard. You will tell no one about your mother, nor the lies she has fed you all your childhood. You belong to _me_ now, boy.”

Just like that, Jon was whisked away, ordered to leave everything but the clothes on his back. 

His mother’s necklace, he kept hidden beneath his filthy shirt.

The journey to his new father’s estate had been arduous, particularly with such an odious man. Jon was often forced to ride outside the carriage. 

Apparently there was only so much of his presence his _father_ could stand. 

Winterfell Castle was as gray as the cold North and its desolate moors, like Mother had described on her good days. Winterfell’s inhabitants all spoke with the same heavy brogue Jon had heard from Mother’s worst drunken ramblings. 

The servants were stern, proud as any king and looked down their noses at him. As a bastard, Jon was considered little more than a hired hand, and an expected deviant by nature. He didn’t mind so much that he was forced to sleep in the servant’s wing, or work the grounds and attend the groom when required. Who could argue with two meals a day and a clean bed? Although he often smelled of horse shit, at least he wasn’t gagging on the stench of rotting fish. 

His “half-siblings” Robb and Sansa—both red-haired with eyes bluer than the skies—treated him with distant politeness. Robb was at least more interesting than Sansa, who seemed little better than a bird crafted to repeat pleasantries. Sansa did her best to ignore him, while Robb was only kind beyond their father’s hearing. Robb would become Warden of the North one day, after all. Best the bastard knew his place.

Jon’s first clear memory of color appeared in the bloom of the heather on the moors of Winterfell, in Sansa’s fiery hair and Robb’s blue eyes. Yet what truly made this new life worth Eddard’s occasional drunken beatings— _not my father, mine sang songs to the poor and was a true knight_ —was the girl.

The first time Jon saw her was after a ringing blow to the head when he hadn’t answered quickly enough, his first night at Winterfell. He’d struggled to get his bearings, then stilled when he heard a sharp hiss from the dark staircase. 

A flash of lightning illuminated the girl’s silvery gray eyes— _wild as the sea_ —and he could barely breathe. Something in those eyes reached into the darkest parts of his shriveled heart and drug their hooks deeply. 

The following day, the girl hid from him while Father introduced his household to the bastard, Jon Snow. 

Jon kept his head bowed, a show of obedience, while his senses strained for sign of the girl.

 _She was a ghost_ , he was beginning to believe. 

Until the girl came rushing into the stables after lunch, mud coating her boots, dark hair flying wild about her puckish face. She was such a little thing in the misty light, and his heart lurched the moment their gazes met. 

“Oh!” The girl’s sun-browned cheeks dimpled as she approached him. “You’re my brother, Jon.”

He cringed at the label. Beating back the overwhelming urge to shout the truth, he instead growled, “I’m the bastard.” Her smile faded and Jon inwardly cursed.

“I know.” She caught his cold hand with warm fingers and smiled as she said, “I’m Arya.”


	3. as different as a moonbeam from lightening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire.”

The servants often whispered of the friendship between the Lord’s bastard and wild daughter. 

“Too like her aunt,” they would lament amongst themselves. 

Her resemblance to Lyanna, coupled with Lady Stark’s death, had done the girl no favors. Lord Eddard allowed his youngest child free reign, and yet he could barely stand the sight of sweet Sansa.

“Too like her mother, that one,” the servants whispered, knowingly. 

Good Lord Robb did his very best to keep the peace. He aided his father, sweeping Lord Eddard’s drunken bouts under the proverbial rug. Robb protected his little sisters, looked after those in his care on the estate and was, to their amazement, kind to Jon Snow. 

The bastard none of them liked. 

“He’ll murder us all in our sleep one day, that one.” Or so they claimed.

Arya Underfoot learned every hidden passage in and out of Winterfell as she grew. Each new discovery she showed Jon—she shared _everything_ with him, of course—and they took great delight in confusing the servants. 

In the beginning, Jon tried to resist. “I don’t want to ruin the first good place I’ve found in life, little sister,” he’d say. 

To which Arya always replied, “No one will notice.”

They roamed the moors between Jon’s chores. No one dared complain of the bastard’s absence when he was in the company of their Lord’s favorite. Arya was well-known to talk her way out of anything, and they knew their place. 

So they said nothing when echoes of laughter threaded through the moaning winds that swept the moors. And they said nothing when the bastard and the girl appeared with four direwolf pups one mid-summer’s eve. 

Secretly, the servants crossed themselves and prayed to the old gods for protection at the troubling sign. “...wargs...skinchangers…” they whispered.

No direwolves had been sighted in the North, not since the last Long Night, when the wolf kings had defeated the ice demons beyond the Wall. 

Arya came to Father with the pups in one basket, after forcing Jon to remain hidden in the shadows. She smiled impishly up at Lord Eddard and simply pled, “Their mother is gone. Please, father, can we keep them?”

Father sighed but his harsh mask broke long enough for him to fondly tousle her wild mane and reply, “‘Tis fitting, I suppose. The direwolf _is_ our sigil… Very well, you shall each care for one pup. Their well being depends on you.”

Arya kissed her father’s cheek and left him to his ghosts.

Jon escaped to the stables with his snow-white pup hidden in his jacket, while Arya passed the other two to her siblings. 

Over time, Robb’s pup, Grey Wind became fierce but obedient. But Sansa’s Lady was tame as a lap dog. Arya named hers Nymeria, for her favorite warrior Queen. Jon called the runt of the litter Ghost. 

Though the servants considered it an offense the bastard was allowed a pet, they also feared how easily the growing beasts heeded their masters. “It’s unnatural…” they would mutter. Old Nan’s tales suddenly seemed more real and altogether frightening. If the direwolves were real, why not grumpkins, snarks or worse, the mythical Others?

As they grew in size, Nymeria and Ghost were most often together. Together with their wild masters, they would race across the moors. Eventually, they took to the wilderlands even after their masters were abed. And so the howling of wolves became a familiar lullaby Arya and Jon would fall asleep to. Each night while they slept, and their wolves mated and hunted, Arya and Jon dreamed wolf dreams.


	4. worked into a fever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever; your veins are full of ice water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”

Seven years after Ned Stark brought his bastard to Winterfell, the summons to King’s Landing could no longer be ignored. 

Jon watched with bated breath, head down and on his best behavior, while Ned gathered a third of his household, bound for the king’s court. 

_He won’t take a bastard with him,_ Jon reassured himself. There were also all the things his mother had whispered to him in the night, “ _you are a prince, my lad,_ ” and her necklace hidden beneath his shirt even now. 

Jon watched from the shadows of the great hall as Ned Stark bid the gathering of Northern lords farewell and officially passed his lordship to Robb. 

_No more beatings, no more taunts,_ Jon thought in wonderment as the feast began. 

Sansa cried pretty tears as she clutched Robb’s shoulders and bid her farewell. The fire-kissed daughter Lord Eddard couldn’t look in the eyes was taking Lady and her courtly graces to King’s Landing as well. 

Arya flew through a reel at the center of the hall, trading partners in an interweaving dance to the wail of pipes and pounding drums.

Jon kept his hands clasped tightly behind his back and ground his teeth while he watched. 

They should not have been allowed to touch Arya. 

“ _I belong to you, Jon, just as you belong to me,_ ” she’d claimed long ago.

She was fifteen now, a woman grown, with her dark hair wreathed in a crown of winter roses and forced into her dead aunt’s altered gown. 

Arya was laughing at something some _fucking_ lord had said, and it was all Jon could do to keep his feet rooted. 

_Don’t fuck this up. They’re leaving—nearly all of them,_ finally _—and you will be together._

“Jon?” Arya startled him with the touch of her hand on his arm. “Why are you hiding over here, foolish boy?”

A harsh breath passed through clenched teeth as Jon wildly drank in the vision before him. 

She was ethereal, all silvery eyes and sharp features, and the figure hidden by skirts hardened from roaming the wilds at his side. She was beautiful with blue blossoms threaded about her head and standing far too close. She was _everything_. 

When he didn’t speak, Arya glanced over her shoulder, then smirked wickedly at him. “Come with me. Don’t worry, they’ll never notice.”

Jon was helpless the instant her fingers threaded through his. He longed to draw her as she was now, on one of the papers she’d bequeathed him over the years. Arya didn’t know about the drawings he’d done of her over the years, always careful to either burn or hide the evidence away. 

The passage she led him through ended at an unused room on the third floor. It should have smelled musty, but this was one of their many hiding places not even the servants knew of. 

They were barely through the door before she was laughing, “Did you see the poor lumps trying to woo me? _Me_ , the Witch of Winterfell. They think I don’t know what they say about me?” 

She cackled as she sank onto the bed and pulled him down beside her. 

Jon shuddered as his gaze drank in the moonlight spilling over her gray dress, outlining her breasts and the flare of her hip. 

His hand reached for her before he could stop himself. He was always touching her when he shouldn’t.

Arya’s laughter faded at the press of his palm at her waist. Carefully, she tugged at his stuffy cravat. “I cannot believe you allowed Father to force you into this.”

 _Not my father._ How he’d longed to confess the truth to her. And yet, for some reason, he never could, for fear she would hate him. 

_Dragon bastard—Blackfyre..._

Jon sighed as Arya proceeded to untie the restrictive cloth at his neck. “Seeing them paw at you was more than I could bear,” he confessed.

She stilled, his name passing her lips and he opened his eyes to the mirrored wildness stirring in his blood. Her chest heaved, once, twice, and it was suddenly too much. 

Neither could be sure after who moved first. 

Her hand tugged his cravat, pulling him to her with surprising force. 

He dragged her hip to lie flush against his. 

Their lips crashed together in a painful biting tangle. 

Jon groaned and nearly came undone at the unladylike growl which echoed from Arya’s throat. 

She hiked up her skirts and straddled him on the bed, rubbing against the erection straining against his breeches with abandon. Jon’s hips bucked, helpless to meet her, to consume and _be_ consumed by her.

“Arya,” he moaned as her lips latched to the pulse at his neck. 

He ran his hands over every curve he had fantasized touching. 

_Gods, why didn’t this happen sooner?_

He gasped as she nipped at his skin, then pulled back to reveal a cruel smile. “Gods, I’ve wanted to do that since I was twelve,” she confessed.

Jon shuddered. Of course, he hadn’t always seen her as he did now. But he was older than she was, and he’d been too often plagued by the _wicked_ thoughts he had of her. _Gods_ , he was as wrong as the world claimed he was, wasn’t he?

“Arya, we shouldn’t…” He moaned again as she purposely dragged her center over his pulsing cock. He gaped as she pulled his hands from her hips to cover her breasts. 

“Jon,” she commanded, “we belong together. You are _mine_ , remember?”

“ _Yours,_ ” he affirmed as he sat up and claimed her lips with his.

_Nothing else matters._

They made love while Nymeria and Ghost mated in the godswood throughout the night. 

Nearly no one questioned the bastard’s or Eddard’s wild girl’s absence, long used to their disappearances. But Sansa had meant to say farewell to her loathsome little sister. With her impending departure, she worried over who would make certain Arya attended her lessons, or dressed like a lady. Sansa noticed, but knew not enough to make the right connections. Even if she had, who would she have told, now that Mother was gone?


	5. honeysuckles embracing the thorn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”

With Sansa gone, Robb split his attention between managing the estate and making a good match for his wild sister. To Arya’s endless frustration, Robb seemed determined to make her respectable enough for one of the many offers for her hand. 

The first time Robb proposed inviting one of the young Lords to Winterfell, Arya had tossed the soup tureen over the dining table with a shriek and a threat. “If you want to keep the member that shall give you heirs, by the old gods, Robb, you will leave me be!”

Jon had been delightedly surprised by the intensity of her lovemaking later that night. He'd come with her blunt teeth closed over his shoulder, marking him hers.

Ignoring Arya's threats, Robb invited different Lords and their sons to Winterfell. All were dismayed by the cruelty of the youngest Stark. Aye, she was beautiful, but she lacked all decorum, and her mocking laughter chilled them.

Jon privately seethed and stole from his father’s private stash of ale on these nights. All the while, he would rage over his helplessness. How he itched to grab the sword Mikken had helped him forge in secret, and run each of the _little shits_ through for so much as looking at his Arya. 

He hid from her after these dinners, until the eve she found him drunk in the stables and pounced on him. He could barely think straight when she touched him with such determination. As she hiked up her skirts and removed their smallclothes before taking him to the hilt, Jon saw a world of colors within her eyes.

“Run away with me,” she whispered afterward, fingers playing with his mother’s dragon necklace. “We’ll sail to Nymerios, or Bravos, I don’t care…” 

_So long as you’re with me_ , they both thought.

Jon’s embrace tightened about her waist. She was still so small in his arms, but to Jon, she fit perfectly. 

“Marry me,” he whispered back in her ear. He didn’t dare speak any louder.

Arya stiffened, shuddered and shattered his hopes with her laughter. “Surely you’re joking? Who the fuck would marry _us,_ Jon?”

He framed her face with his servant’s hands and gave her a tight smile. “A man would do anything with a blade at his neck. I would carve anyone up who dared challenge us.”

Arya only kissed him and said, “I’m already your mate, Jon.” 

But it wasn’t enough, not for the bastard of Winterfell, that boy with no true father or name. He needed to claim her for himself, make every Lord in the North choke on it. He wanted Winterfell and all the things the Starks had denied his disgraced mother years ago. He wanted to rule them, knowing he was the bastard of a dragon. He wanted to see them _pay_. And he wanted Arya at his side through all of it.


	6. spears pointed at both ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

Robb was listening to petitioners the morning the raven came. 

_Dark wings, dark words_. 

“Call our banners!” He shouted in a red rage, the instant he read the message:

_The King is dead, betrayed by Ned Stark, Chief Minister of Westeros._

_The traitor was given a traitor’s death._

_Long live King Joffery Baratheon, First of His Name._

War had not come from within the United Kingdoms in over thirty years, not since the Targaryen dynasty had been at long last decimated. 

Nearly every man in the North pledged to join Robb Stark in his war to avenge his father’s death. 

In the privacy of the lord’s solar, Jon bargained with Robb, “Someone must stay behind and look after Arya, should the worst happen and we be forced to flee to Nymerios or Essos.”

Robb had planned to make Jon a member of his privy council on the journey south with his army. But the bastard's words struck his secret fear, and he already despaired over loss of Sansa, hostage bride of the mad king. “I am trusting you with her life, brother,” Robb finally said before bringing Jon into their first and only embrace.

Arya’s opinion of Jon’s bargain was another matter. 

“What the fuck did you tell him!” she raged. “Do you truly believe I’m helpless? That I cannot lift a bloody finger to defend Winterfell? I’m quicker with a blade than you!”

“I am _trying_ to keep you alive!” he growled back. 

Their shouts echoed in their secret room while the storm rumbled outside the stone walls. 

“You just want to keep me locked up in a tower, like all the other lords,” she hissed as she stalked past him.

A nameless fear gripped his heart at the finality in her tone, at her defiance. 

He caught her before she could reach the door, spun her around and crushed her to him in a violent kiss. Her fists pounded into his back at first, but then her trouser-clad legs wrapped around his waist and she was kissing him back. 

“Do _not_ do that again,” she snarled, before taking him into her welcome heat. 

He would learn of her betrayal too late. 

As Robb’s steward, Jon was expected to be present in the courtyard as the army departed for the south. He did his duty, angry she was clearly hiding after their fight. 

Robb, too, scanned the household with a pained expression before adopting a stern Starck grimace. “Guard her well, brother,” he ordered before mounting his horse.

After it was done, and Winterfell was finally _his_ , Jon searched for Arya in all their usual meeting places.

When this failed, he ordered the servants to track her down. 

Too late, he discovered Nymeria was missing from the stables.

Ghost howled alone in the godswood as Jon raced to her rarely used bedchamber. He tore through her things a man possessed until he found the note. She had left the scroll in the very place she usually kept Needle. The letter was short and brutal:

_A wolf cannot be caged. I will fight to avenge my father._

_Do not try to stop me, or I swear on my mother’s grave, I will never return._

_Yours, Arya_

He couldn’t hide his growing panic any more than he could stopper the rage that made Jon tear her room apart.


	7. take any form

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

The war lasted three brutal years. In this time, the Northern Lords crowned Robb as their king. A call against injustice turned into a war for freedom. The North was not left unscathed. 

Irornborn raided along the shores, coming close enough to threaten Winterfell. From the farthest north, wildlings attempted to cross the Wall. 

None of them counted on the White Wolf, as he was called ever-after. The Bastard of Winterfell was just as brutal in his retaliation—some said even more so—than his brother, the Young Wolf. 

Jon Snow gathered as many commoners from the nearby towns and keeps as he could. They trained together with sword and musket until Jon was confident his militia wouldn’t hesitate to kill first. 

Over time, all came to trust him as much as they feared him. For a darkness surrounded the pale-skinned, black-haired man, an emptiness some said he was born with. 

Only the staff at Winterfell suspected the true cause behind their new lord’s changed manner. Though they never loved him, too familiar with the sullen bastard he’d been, they did come to rely upon him. And they, too, mourned Princess Arya’s unknown fate. 

Lord Snow never did share to where she'd run away. Some whispered their wild princess was avoiding a loveless marriage. Still others claimed spies from the south had stolen her away at the evil queen’s behest. The worst sort wondered if Lord Snow had _done away_ with her, afraid to be unseated by King Robb’s rightful heir. 

Jon cared little for rumors. Indeed, he buried all pain and fear beneath a veneer of hatred for their enemies. He had new clothes made—all in the traditional Northern style—and acted as much a lord as he could pretend to be. 

_It doesn’t matter,_ he told himself each time he routed out enemies or sent relief troops at Robb’s behest. _Nothing matters._

The day Robb sent a raven claiming they would winter in Riverrun, for he had found a Queen, Jon hardly cared. Let his half brother sup and dine and fuck away. He had enough troubles, with the wildlings growing increasingly bold. At least he’d burned the last Irornborn fleet ship and beheaded the Greyjoy heir. 

The second raven arrived not a fortnight after the first. 

_Betrayed by the Freys. King Robb dead with his army at the Twins._

It was everything Jon Snow had ever wanted. 

The Starks were gone. With the truth of his birth hidden, he ruled Winterfell unchallenged as King. Yet Jon did not celebrate, as the smallfolk had expected. Instead, the echoes of his rage and despair sounded through the castle halls long into the night. And the servants shuddered to hear variations of the same terrible plea, “Return to me, I beg you!”

A fortnight after their newly crowned King refused to leave Princess Arya’s bedchamber, he remerged a changed man. All emotions seemed to have been bled from Jon Snow, replaced by a being as cold and unfeeling as the fabled Night’s King.


	8. a collection of memoranda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.”

By day, he ruled the North. 

“Let the South come,” he was known to say. The Lannister army would not dare cross the neck, not after what King Snow had done to the Ironborn. 

What wildlings remained, the king used to bolster their border defenses. Any remaining Northerners who had secretly objected to a bastard’s rule kept silent out of fear. 

_Who was this king,_ they thought, _who makes wildlings submit and keeps a direwolf at his beck and call?_

And though he ruled with an icy fist by day, the servants trembled to hear his haunted cries by night. “Bring her back to me, you old gods! Gods of my mother, you owe me this one girl. I want my bride back...”

In the light of morning, Jon could lose himself to his duty and for a blessed time, forget he had lost everything that ever truly mattered to him. 

But the sun set early in the North, the summers drew short, and with winter upon them, the nights grew longer.

Night was both his boon and his blessing. For at night, he lost himself to tortured dreams. At night, he could forget Arya was dead because he had not held onto her tightly enough. 

She haunted his dreams. Oh! How he longed for her to haunt him in truth. 

Sleep began to evade him, and so he would wander, a ghost in his own halls, searching for her spirit.

“You will not leave me alone, will you, my love?” he whispered as he rested upon the bed they had shared countless times. He could no longer smell her on the sheets, and this drove him to drink. 

One morning, not long after he’d begun to accept his madness, a white raven came to Winterfell. 

Winter was here. All who had escaped the Red Wedding had already returned or were presumed dead.

Jon rode outside the castle walls, bloodlust hot in his veins, desperate for release.

Winter was here, and she was lost to him forever. 

He found his way across the moors they had so often haunted until he came to the lone weirwood tree, their most sacred secret place. 

The blood red leaves stirred as he approached over the snow blanketed the earth. Ghost watched, a silent sentinel nearby, as the King in the North pressed his bare hands to the white bark and prayed to the gods his mother had believed in.

_Bring her back to me, you old gods. Bring her back or so help me, I will find a way to bring fire and blood to the whole United Kingdoms. I swear this, by the gods of my true father._

His hands numbed from the cold, but Jon did not care. He would linger until he was certain. Until this final foolish _forbidden_ act was either punished or repaid. 

He pulled the dagger free and sliced his hand, but before he could press it to the weirwood— 

“Jon?” her ghost called.


	9. if all else perished

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”

They left Nymeria and Ghost to their reunion on the moors. He could hardly breathe as to think clearly—blood from his hand staining her cloak—as he carried her too-thin form back to Winterfell. 

He had thought her an apparition, his prayer come to life. He had feared the emptiness in her lined eyes and the small scars about her hands and face, her threadbare soldier’s clothes. The cloak might have been fine once. Now it was torn, muddied and bloodied beyond recognition. Her hair had been shorn at some point and fell curling about her scarred neck. 

Her grip about his neck was fierce, despite her too-shallow breaths. Jon sped back to the castle and focused on the solidness of her form against his chest, in his arms, the pure scent of her peeking from beneath unwashed days of travel. How long had she wandered alone with Nymeria? 

_Gods…_ he trembled with rage at the thought of what had put that emptiness in her beautiful eyes. 

The household was in an uproar as soon as the king returned with the missing Stark girl in his arms. 

Maester Tarly was summoned immediately (all Southron doctors had been banned since the outbreak of the war).

Jon did not leave Arya’s side—insisted on bathing and changing her himself—and crawled into bed the moment she was deemed safe. 

Jon watched her breathe, his bed awash with candlelight and could not stop his tears any more than he could help the fire in his blood each time he thought of Maester Tarly’s diagnosis.

“ _...torn, from multiple cases of abuse, my king. Most of her other scars appear to be from knife and sword wounds. A musket ball tore through her right arm…”_

His fists clenched as he worked to quell his need to release the urge to raise all his power and _crush_ the fucking South for harming her. 

_This was your fault. She would have never left had you not kept her safe from herself._

Arya had always been willful, he knew this better than anyone. 

Only she kept him from acting on his impulses as Robb Stark once had. And Jon was not a Stark, not truly. He was like his father, a dragon who dared steal a wolf. 

“I shan’t make the same mistakes he did, my love,” he whispered to her sleeping form. At last, he allowed himself to brush her shorn hair behind her ear, then catch her warm hand in his. “I will never leave you to go battle some faceless enemy in the south. We are the North, now, my love and once you are well, you may rule by my side as my queen. Your enemies will be my enemies, as your soul is twined with mine. I swear it, Arya, by the old gods of both our fathers, I will never let you leave me again.”

Her full lips twitched in her sleep and Jon gently squeezed her hand before finally giving in to a deep sleep.

Arya opened her eyes the moment his breathing evened and gently squeezed his hand. “Yours,” she whispered, before curling into his cool embrace with a sigh.

At last, she was home.

**Author's Note:**

> Please keep in mind this work is inspired and partly based on Emily Brontë's classicly disturbing work of fiction: Wuthering Heights. This is a romantic fantasy and not a healthy one at that. Disturbing themes are hinted at throughout, so please do not read if you are looking for a happy romance. (Final Warning! This is NOT your average fairy tale!) This being said, I hope everyone else enjoys, and I can't wait to see you at my other Jonrya Week fics.


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